Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Camus, Albert

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

If poverty is the mother of crime, lack of good sense is the father.

La Bruyere, Jean De

There is a new billboard outside Time Square. It keeps an up-to minute count of gun-related crimes in New York. Some goofball is going to shoot someone just to see the numbers move.

Letterman, David

Every rascal is not a thief, but every thief is a rascal.

Aristotle

It is because they took the easy way out that rivers, and people, go crooked.

Peterson, Jill

Many commit the same crime with a different destiny; one bears a cross as the price of his villainy, another wears a crown.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else.

Porter, O. Henry

The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.

Canetti, Elias

10.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

Arendt, Hannah

11.

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

Genet, Jean

12.

The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you.

Miller, Henry

13.

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

Twain, Mark

14.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

15.

Want of money and the distress of a thief can never be alleged as the cause of his thieving, for many honest people endure greater hardships with fortitude. We must therefore seek the cause elsewhere than in want of money, for that is the miser's passion, not the thief s.

Blake, William

16.

Abscond. To move in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.

Bierce, Ambrose

17.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

18.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

19.

The truth of the matter is that muggers are very interesting people.

Winner, Michael

20.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

21.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

22.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

Shaw, George Bernard

23.

There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.

Durkheim, Emile

24.

One usually dies because one is alone, or because one has got into something over one's head. One often dies because one does not have the right alliances, because one is not given support. In Sicily the Mafia kills the servants of the State that the State has not been able to protect.

Falcone, Giovanni

25.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

26.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

27.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

28.

The greatest crime in the world is not developing your potential. When you do what you do best, you are helping not only yourself, but the world.

Williams, Roger

29.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

30.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Mencken, H. L.

31.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

32.

After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.

Huston, John

33.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

Waugh, Evelyn

34.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.

Genet, Jean

35.

Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.

Christie, Agatha

36.

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

Ellis, Havelock

37.

We are often deterred from crime by the disgrace of others.

Horace

38.

Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.

Kraus, Karl

39.

There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.

Hazlitt, William

40.

Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Connolly, Cyril

41.

Save a thief from the gallows and he will cut your throat.

Proverb, French

42.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one consider that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

Allen, Woody

43.

All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost -- the most legitimate -- passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one.

Sade, Marquis De

44.

My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way.

Capone, Al

45.

He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen, let him not know't, and he's notrobbed at all

Shakespeare, William

46.

There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

Wells, H.G.

48.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

49.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

50.

He reminds me of the man who murdered both his parents, and then when the sentence was about to be pronounced, pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was orphan.

Lincoln, Abraham